On December 7, SenseTime opened a public offering, and the international placement part has been fully subscribed (accounting for 90% of the total number of issues). According to the global offering documents, SenseTime received a total of US$450 million from 9 cornerstone investors, including the Mixed Ownership Reform Fund initiated by China Chengtong, Guosheng Overseas Hong Kong, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Equity Investment Fund, SAIC Hong Kong, GF Fund, Pleiad Fund, WT, Focustar and Hell Ved, with a 60% subscription ratio of Cornerstone.
It is reported that SenseTime plans to issue 1.5 billion ordinary shares globally, of which 90% are international placement shares and 10% are Hong Kong public offering shares, with an offer price range of HK$3.85-3.99 per share, and intend to raise HK$5.775 billion to HK$5.985 billion (about 4.718 billion to 4.889 billion yuan). According to the plan, SenseTime will be listed on the morning of December 17 under the code "0020.HK", and the joint sponsors of the listing will be CICC, Haitong and HSBC.
According to the prospectus, SenseTime cornerstone investors are very rich, including state-owned capital focusing on investing in innovative industries and artificial intelligence industries, leading enterprises in the automobile industry, as well as long-term funds and hedge funds, and investment institutions have obvious intentions to anchor hard technology stocks such as SenseTime as core assets.
According to public information, the mixed ownership reform fund, Guosheng Overseas Hong Kong, and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Equity Investment Fund, the three cornerstone investors have a positive attitude in cultivating strategic emerging industries, which are in line with SenseTime's hard technology attributes and have strategic investment synergies.
SenseTime has also introduced two cornerstone investors, SAIC Hong Kong and Focusstar. SenseTime is a long-term ecological partner of SAIC Motor and has in-depth cooperation in the field of intelligent vehicles. Focusstar is a deeply empowered industrial investment platform under Five Star Holdings, focusing on the industrial Internet and new energy fields, including: logistics, construction machinery, new energy vehicle industry chain, photovoltaic, energy storage, and hydrogen energy new opportunities under the carbon neutrality policy. In the long run, SenseTime and the two cornerstones also have room for cooperation in the future, especially in the development of SenseTime's smart business and smart car strategic sectors, which may form business synergy.
At the same time, SenseTime also attracts long-term funds that insist on value investment, and the investment philosophy coincides with the long-term doctrine that SenseTime adheres to. According to public information, WT focuses on achieving absolute returns and long-term capital appreciation, and GF Fund is one of the few "fully licensed" fund management companies in the industry, and it is also a fund company known for its growth stock investment. The commentary believes that the value of hard technology enterprises such as SenseTime has been underestimated for a long time, and the participation of long-term fund cornerstone investors will help SenseTime build a long-term stable capital rear.
As a representative of China's AI hard technology, SenseTime's IPO has become the focus of many investors. Investors generally agree that in the past 20 years, China's economy represented by China's Internet model innovation has flourished, and the new productivity represented by hard technology will promote the deep integration of digital technology and the real economy, which will become a new development trend in the next 10-20 years.
Artificial intelligence is a key driver of this trend. Looking around the industry, SenseTime has led the industry in terms of team depth, business scale, AI infrastructure, large computing power and other research and development investment. After the realization of the industrial mass production of AI software, the growth and scarcity shown by SenseTime are also the main reasons why investors position it as a new core asset and are optimistic for a long time.
The data shows that since 2018, SenseTime's performance has maintained strong growth, with a compound growth rate of 36.4% from 2018 to 2020. In the first half of 2021, SenseTime's revenue increased from RMB861 million in the same period of 2020 to RMB1.652 billion, an increase of 91.8% year-on-year. Based on the R&D efficiency improvement brought about by SenseCore SenseTime AI large-scale device, SenseTime's AI model R&D efficiency has increased by more than 11 times in three and a half years, and SenseTime's gross profit margin has increased significantly from 56.5% in 2018 to 73.0% in the first half of 2021, with obvious scale effects.
In terms of commercialization, SenseTime's business layout has penetrated into dozens of sub-industries in the four major areas of smart business, smart city, smart life and smart car. As of June 30, 2021, SenseTime's software platform has more than 2,400 customers, including more than 250 Fortune 500 companies and listed companies, 119 cities and more than 30 automotive companies, and SenseTime has empowered more than 450 million mobile phones and more than 200 mobile applications.
Dr. Xu Li, Chairman and CEO of SenseTime, said: "Ai ai software will be one of the fastest growing business areas in the next decade. SenseTime has made various technological breakthroughs, created an unprecedented artificial intelligence infrastructure in the industry, realized the mass production of high-performance AI models, and rapidly deployed AI models and applications in a variety of scenarios through our software platform. In the future, we will continue to adhere to the original cutting-edge research to realize the connection between the physical world and the digital world with artificial intelligence, promote the sustainable development of social productivity, and bring people a better combination of virtual and real life experience. ”
This article originated from Grand Gateway
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